'Give me your tired ...'

SMSO journeys to 'Ellis Island' for finale

Just talking about his own experience of immigrating to the United States, Robin Fountain admits, has made him cry on his end of the telephone.

The music director for the Southwest Michigan Symphony Orchestra, Fountain conducts Peter Boyer's "Ellis Island: The Dream of America" as the major work at Friday's season-concluding concert at Lake Michigan College's Mendel Center.

"This whole concert, everything about it, has deep meaning for me," he says by phone while taking a break from gardening at his home in Pennsylvania. "On some level or another, I've lived this story. Just as the people whose stories are acted in this production, they speak of very intense gratitude for what they had, and that's certainly what I feel."

Like the 12 million people who were processed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954, Fountain's first sight of the United States was of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, albeit from an airplane rather than a ship.

At the time, in 1985, Fountain had completed his studies at Oxford University and the Royal College of Music, but, he says, England's budget for the arts was in a period of contraction, so he accepted a fellowship from Carnegie-Mellon University for graduate study.

"It was clear that if I stayed in England," he says, "I would have been working in a record store instead of doing what I had trained to do. ... Everything that has followed is precisely the dream expressed in 'Ellis Island.' "

Premiered in 2002 by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Boyer's "Ellis Island" combines his symphonic music with the stories of seven immigrants who were processed at Ellis Island and more than 85 photographs projected above the orchestra, most of them during the prologue.

"These people talk about what was the often harrowing experience of deciding to come to the United States and getting here," Fountain says about the seven immigrants' stories. "Now, I wasn't pushed out of the United Kingdom out of abject poverty, but it was in every sense to seek my fortune when I came."

'Separation and reunion'

Boyer conceived of the idea for "Ellis Island" while working on his 1995 tone poem, "Titanic" and the interest into early-20th century immigration his research into the ship's April 1912 sinking spurred in him.

"I was fascinated by the idea that so many of these folks really had a great lack of knowledge compared to us today," he says by telephone from his home in Altadena, Calif. "I think it's hard for us to imagine how little they knew about the land they were immigrating to. In many cases, they had family members who had immigrated and achieved at least sustenance, but many of them came on faith."

When Boyer began work on "Ellis Island," the work had been commissioned by the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford, Conn., as a 30-minute piece that he envisioned would include stories from five men and five women who had been interviewed for the Ellis Island Oral History Project.

But he soon realized his plan to give each story two minutes wasn't feasible, and after requesting the transcripts and cassettes for 20 of the 110 stories he looked at from the approximately 2,000 interviews that had been conducted, he settled on seven people: Helen Lansman Cohen, who emigrated from Poland in 1920; James Apanomith, Greece, 1911; Lillian Galletta, Italy, 1928; Lazarus Salamon, Hungary, 1920; Helen Rosenthal, Belgium, 1940; Manny Steen, Ireland, 1925; and Katherine Beychok, Russia, 1910.

The text is taken verbatim from their interviews.

"I highlighted passages that I knew had to be there," he says, "and then it became a process of whittling it down to what worked best and in what order."

For instance, when Boyer heard Cohen say, "I was dreaming of coming to America," he knew she would be the first story in the piece, and when Beychok referred to Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus," the poem engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, he knew her story would be last.

"The most important aspect," he says, "was that each of the stories spoke to me personally. ... These vignettes are representative of thousands or millions of people."

Of the seven, only Galletta was alive when "Ellis Island" premiered, and the Hartford Symphony arranged for her and her five remaining siblings to attend the premiere, which Boyer conducted.

Her parents and two older siblings immigrated first, and a couple of years later, in 1928, they sent for Galletta and her four older siblings who had been left behind in Italy. Their ship was almost lost in a storm near the Rock of Gibraltar during their voyage.

"The emotional climax of that story is their father meeting them at Ellis Island and getting down on his knees and saying they will never be apart again," Boyer says. "She cries on the tape when she tells it. It's a universal theme, separation and reunion."

In a figurative way, Boyer's research provided him with a reunion of sorts for him and his family history: While he was researching Ellis Island's records, he found the immigration record for his great-grandfather, Francesco Pannone. Pannone and his sister, Michelina Pannone, entered the U.S. from Naples through Ellis Island in May 1912. Even Francesco's son and Boyer's grandfather, Edward Pannone, hadn't known about their family's connection to Ellis Island.

"The Titanic had sunk just a few weeks earlier," Boyer says, "and I realized my great-grandfather had left just a few weeks after the Titanic, and the Titanic is what had set me onto this piece."

'Out and out brilliant'

By this fall, "Ellis Island" will have been performed 140 times since its premiere, a remarkable feat for a new work in classical music, especially for an orchestral one. Friday's performance by the SMSO, in fact, is its second time with the work, following a 2005 performance under Fountain's predecessor.

Boyer also has recorded it with the Philharmonia Orchestra for a 2005 CD on the Naxos label.

The 45-minute work opens with a six-minute orchestral prologue that introduces several of the musical themes that repeat through the piece while 85 photographs of immigrants at Ellis Island are projected above the orchestra.

"The prologue is sort of a visual thumbnail history of Ellis Island," Boyer says. "In the first shot, we see several thousand immigrants posed on the deck of the ship. In Ken Burns style, we pan out and out and see how many there are."

Taken from Ellis Island's archives, many of the photographs have become iconic images of immigration because of their use in other media.

"Their faces, to me, tell their story," Boyer says. "They're very poignant. You get a sense of what it must have been like to go through this process at Ellis Island."

During the seven vignettes that the actors perform, the music, Boyer says, serves as an underscore and then "really speaks up" during the interludes between stories to comment upon the previous one and introduce the next.

For the Irishman Manny Steen, who Boyer calls "a real raconteur," he wrote a Tin Pan Alley-style accompaniment, but for Helen Rosenthal's account of losing her family at Auschwitz and escaping the Holocaust, he incorporated Jewish modal themes with the violin.

The rest, Boyer says, by and large can be referred to as contemporary Americana writing, with echoes of three of his favorite composers present -- Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein and John Williams.

"I attempted to provide this emotional undercurrent to these stories," he says, "and I think the combination of spoken words with music can be powerful."

Although he compares the music to "the highest level of the kind of music you would find in a superb movie," Fountain says it isn't merely illustrative and transcends the film soundtrack genre to stand alone as an orchestral composition.

"He's a contemporary composer, and he uses the language you might find in film music but in a way that I think is unique to this piece to create something that is much more significant," he says. "It also uses the orchestra in all its glory, sometimes very intimately with few players and sometimes with the whole orchestra giving forth. It's a very, very wide palette of sounds used with great skill. ... It's out and out brilliant."

The sense of feeling free for the first time

The concert opens with Rimsky-Korsakov's "Dance of the Tumblers" from "The Snow Maiden, conducted by local resident LoVina Gow, whose son purchased the honor for her at the SMSO's annual auction.

Fountain then takes over to conclude the first half with Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances."

"The obvious choice was a piece by an immigrant composer from the late 19th century and early 20th century," he says about finding something to complement "Ellis Island." "I wanted to do something that was truly musically special. ... ('Symphonic Dances') may not be his best-known work, but among musicians, it's his best piece. It's his tightest. There's not a wasted note in it."

It also is the last piece written by Rachmaninoff, who died March 28, 1943, less than two months after he and his wife became American citizens.

"He basically sums up everything he ever learned about music in his life," Fountain says. "It quotes some music from earlier in his life, the first symphony, bits of Russian church music."

With the concert falling on Memorial Day weekend and during the Senior PGA Championship at Benton Harbor's Golf Club at Harbor Shores, Fountain picked "Ellis Island" as an appropriate piece to celebrate the U.S. and perhaps draw audience members who are in town for the golf tournament.

"They all speak of the palpable sense of feeling free for the first time in their lives," Fountain says about the seven immigrants in the work and how it celebrates the U.S. "We're always talking about being free in this country, but I think when you hear these stories, you get a sense of what that actually means and what the absence of freedom means."

As Boyer says, today's immigrants likely know much more about the U.S. than their predecessors did before arriving here, but some similarities remain. Immigration, for instance, remains a contentious issue; then as now, those who were already in the U.S. often resisted the arrival of newcomers, and as both Boyer and Fountain say, the U.S. still beckons the world's downtrodden as a place of opportunity and release from oppression.

"There's a reason those people underwent a tremendous ocean voyage and all kinds of privation to get here," Fountain says about past immigrants. "Obviously, the same is true now with people from various parts of the world battering at the door to get to the United States. We should remember how fortunate we are to be in this special place that so many people in the world are so desperate to come to